A French parliamentary investigation into Uber has concluded there are “serious flaws” in France’s system of governing the gig economy, with “gaping loopholes” in rules around transparency still in place almost 10 years after the ride-hailing app established itself in Paris and beyond.
The six-month investigation, prompted by the Guardian’s Uber Files revelations last year and involving 67 hearings and testimony from 120 witnesses, found Uber benefited from a close relationship with Emmanuel Macron when he was the economy minister and the company was trying to establish its services.
“The intensity of the contacts between Uber, Emmanuel Macron and his cabinet testifies to an opaque but privileged relationship and reveals the inability of our system to measure and prevent the influence of private interests on public decision-making,” it concluded.
It found that Uber’s strategy “based on the deliberate violation of the law was coupled with aggressive lobbying to penetrate the heart of the French elite and exert influence in society in order to enhance Uber’s image and obtain the adaptation of its laws”.
Last summer, Macron said he would not change a thing about the approach he took to the US firm and said it was appropriate to facilitate the lifting of red tape.
Uber said it had “openly contributed to the committee’s investigation” and transformed “every aspect of how Uber operates in France” in recent years.
The report found that Macron was the subject of a “major manipulation operation” and Uber’s methods “elicited little reaction from the public authorities … despite the illicit nature of its activities”.
Foremost among Uber’s supporters was Macron, it said, who was willing to defend the company’s interests.
In evidence, the former prime minister Manuel Valls and the former interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said they resisted Uber’s lobbying to be allowed to gain entry to the market.
“Uber’s strategy was totally cynical. It consisted in aggressively and disruptively multiplying fronts to force the state to modify its regulations so that they became favourable to Uber’s interests, which was unacceptable,” Cazeneuve told the commission.
However, the inquiry pointed out, the law had not been enforced and Uber managed to launch its UberPop private driver service from early 2014 to 2015 when it was manifestly not legal.
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What are the Uber files?
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The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
The investigation found that political figures were still “sympathetic” to those who support the “Uberisation” of work, which it said established a “capitalist model of outsourcing employment that destroys salaried workers and workers’ rights with the sole intention of maximising profits”.
It said the “consequences of Uber’s development have been harmful to all players in the public transport sector” as well as to the broader economy in relation to the non-payment of corporation tax and social security contributions.
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The report raised concerns about the practice giving rise to a phenomenon of “dark kitchens”, or delivery-only restaurants, that do not serve onsite.
The rapid proliferation of the casualisation of work in other sectors with the rise of services such Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Getir and other temporary work platforms including Mediflast and StaffMe also gave the commission pause for thought.
It said a “danger of Uberisation was “the extreme casualisation of workers, especially those without papers”.
The commission issued 47 recommendations including strengthening rules around lobbying of politicians. “These loopholes [around lobbying] remain gaping almost 10 years after the first facts uncovered by these revelations, as demonstrated by the development of delivery platforms as well as in many other sectors,” it said.
The commission concluded that there was an “obvious lack of resources” and “glaring lack of political will” to see through efforts to counter the casualisation of work.
Benjamin Haddad, of Macron’s Renaissance party, disagreed with the conclusions, arguing that while Uber had used every possible means to establish itself in France, “the response of the public decision-makers has proved to be both appropriate and effective”.
A spokesperson for Uber said: “We’re committed to being a responsible partner to France and our senior leadership team, including our CEO, have openly contributed to the committee’s investigation. Over the past six years under Dara’s [Khosrowshahi, the chief executive] leadership, we have transformed every aspect of how Uber operates in France. This includes working with unions to introduce guaranteed social protections for more than 100,000 people who use the Uber app and partnering with cities to deliver on our pledge to be a zero-emissions platform by 2030.”
